The Boy Who Saw: A Solomon Creed Novel

Dedication

For my sister Becky, her husband, Joe, and for little William Quinn Francesco Pingue, born 11/16/16. Who knows what that boy will see?

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Part I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part II

Interlude I

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part III

Interlude II

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Part IV

Interlude III

23

24

25

26

27

28

Part V

Interlude IV

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

Part VI

Interlude V

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

Part VII

Interlude VI

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

Part VIII

Interlude VII

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

Part IX

Interlude VIII

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

Part X

Interlude IX

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Simon Toyne

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part I

Three may keep a secret,

if two of them are dead.

—Benjamin Franklin

1

Nothing else smells like blood.

Blood mixed with fear is something else again. Josef Engel had not smelled it in over seventy years—seventy years and he still remembered it like the years had been nothing. And this time the smell was coming from him.

He stared down at his shrunken body, his head too heavy to lift, old skin drooping like canvas over the frame of his ribs. Blood dripped vivid against the white of it, leaking from cuts in his chest that formed the Star of David. Other wounds tickled as they bled, slashes on his back where he’d been whipped, puncture wounds from something that had pinched his flesh together to cause fresh pain when he thought he’d already felt every kind there was. The pain was everything now, burning like fire through flesh that remained oddly slack and useless.

The man had come right before closing, walking into the shop and embracing Josef like an old friend. Josef had embraced him back, surprised by the action of this man dressed all in black like a shadow. Then he had felt the pinprick on his neck and tried to pull away, but the shadow man had held him tight and a cold numbness had quickly spread out from the pinprick and into his whole body. He had tried to call for help but it had come out as a drooling moan and his head fell forward on neck muscles no longer able to support the weight of his skull. There was no one around to hear anyway and the man must have known, for he had not been agitated or hurried as he calmly steered Josef to the center of his atelier through the headless mannequins. He had slumped to the floor in the center of the room, his arthritic knees cracking like gunshots, another memory from seventy years ago.

Josef had watched the man’s shadow, cast by the skylights above, moving on the polished wooden floor as he removed Josef’s shirt. A blade had appeared close to his eyes, turning slowly so the light caught the sharpness of its edge before it moved to his chest and cut through white flesh down to the bone, the blood welling around the blade and dripping down his front to the floor. He had watched it all and gasped at the explosions of pain the blade drew from him, wondering how so much agony could be contained in his old body, and why the drugs that had numbed his muscles did nothing to block the pain. He was a prisoner in his own flesh, feeling everything but incapable of doing anything to stop it. Warmth spread over him as first his blood then his bladder and bowels emptied. When the smell of that hit him, he had started to cry because the humiliation was painful too.

Josef had not been this afraid since the war, when pain and death had been commonplace in the labor camps. He had escaped death then but now it had caught up with him. He watched its shadow move away across the polished wooden floor, heard the front door being unlocked and hoped that maybe the shadow man was leaving. But the door was relocked and the shadow returned and something was placed on the floor in front of him.

Tears sprang to Josef’s eyes as he read the faded gold lettering on the wooden sewing machine box—pfaff. It was the same make as the machine he had learned to sew on, before war had come and the world had gone dark, when all he’d wanted to do was listen to the purr of the busy needle and make beautiful things with it. Holes had been drilled in the curved top of the box and a small hatch fitted on one side with a sliding bolt was keeping it shut. A faint scratching was coming from inside.

"Du weißt warum dies dir passiert ist?"

The man’s German was accented and Josef didn’t recognize the voice. He tried to look up again but his head was still too heavy.

You know why this has happened to you? the voice repeated, and a phone appeared in front of Josef’s face, the light from the screen too bright in the evening gloom.

"Erinnerst du dich hieran?" the voice asked.

Josef squinted against the brightness and looked at the black-and-white photograph displayed on the phone.

"Erinnerst du dich hieran? the voice repeated. Remember this?"

Josef did remember.

A hand swiped the screen and more photographs appeared, stark images of terrible things Josef had witnessed with his own eyes: piles of bodies in mass graves; skeletons behind wire fences, on their knees in the mud, too weak to stand, their bony shoulders tenting striped uniforms, shaved heads hanging forward while men in gray uniforms stood over them with whips and guns or the strained leashes of snarling dogs in their leather-gloved hands.

You should have died in the camp, the voice said. We should have wiped away the stain of you back then when we had the chance.

Josef stared into eyes sunk deep in skull-like faces and imagined bony hands reaching out for him across the distance of seventy lost years, and pushing into his chest.

"Der bleiche Mann," he whispered, his numbed tongue blurring the words.

The shadow on the floor moved closer. Tell me about him. Tell me about the pale man.

"Er kommt, Josef replied, his tongue wrapping around a language he had not spoken in decades. He is coming. His mind was drifting now, fogged by the intense pain spreading out from his chest. He will save me und Die Anderen . . . Comme la dernière fois. He will come and save us again."

"Die Anderen, the voice said. Tell me about The Others. Tell me what happened back in the camp. State your name and give me your confession."

Josef hesitated for a moment before starting to speak, the words flowing out of him in a steady stream, loosened by the drug and the feeling that as long as he continued to talk, he would be allowed to live. I kept it safe, Josef said when he had finished his confession, his hands tingling as the drug began to wear off. He reached up to where the skeleton fingers continued to tear at his heart and pain bloomed.

What did you keep safe?

The list, Josef gasped.

Tell me about the list.

"Der weiße Anzug. Josef clutched his chest and pushed back against the pain. The white suit. We promised to keep it safe and we did. All these years we kept it safe."

Josef managed to raise his head a little and stared up at the outline of his killer silhouetted against the skylights. The man reached down and Josef closed his eyes and braced himself for some new pain, but something touched his face and he opened his eyes again and saw a white tissue in the man’s hand, dabbing at the blood around his eyes as gently as a mother cleaning jam from a child’s mouth. Josef started to weep at this unexpected gesture of kindness. He could smell disinfectant on the man’s hand and saw that he was wearing thin surgical gloves the same color as skin.

Remember the camp, the man asked, remember what it was like at the very end, all those bodies piling up and no one left to bury them? He moved over to the wooden box and twisted the tissue until blood squeezed out between his latex-covered fingers. Do you remember the rats? He bent down and fed the tapered end of the tissue into one of the larger holes and the scratching intensified. All those walking skeletons but the rats never went hungry, did they? The tissue twitched and was tugged inside the box with a flurry of squeaks and scratching. I caught these rats near a chicken farm almost a week ago. They haven’t eaten much since—only each other. I wonder how many there are left? He reached down for the bolt holding the hatch shut and Josef felt panicked pain explode in his chest. Or you could tell me more about the white suit and I’ll keep the box shut.

Tears dripped down Josef’s face, stinging as they salted the wounds on his chest. The pain in his chest was unbearable now. He had never escaped the camp, not really. He had carried it with him all this time, and now it was bursting out of him again.

Tell me about the suit. The man slid the latch across but held the door shut.

The pale man, Josef said, shaking uncontrollably, his breathing shallow. We made it for him. He dragged his eyes from the box and looked desperately over at the door as if hoping he might be standing there. He said he would come for it. He said it would keep us safe. We made a deal. He will—

Pain erupted inside Josef, a jagged explosion of glass and fire that forced all the air from his lungs. His eyes flew wide and he crumpled to the floor, gasping for breath but getting none. He lay on his side and saw a thimble lying deep under one of the workbenches, worn and familiar and bent to the shape of his finger over long years of work, the same thimble he’d had back in the camp, back in that cellar. He had lost it a month or so ago and looked for it everywhere. And there it was. And here was he. The pain was consuming him now. Swallowing him whole. Pulling him down. His killer dropped to the floor, cutting off his view of the lost thimble, and Josef felt a pressure on his neck and smelled rubber and disinfectant as fingers checked for a pulse. Josef’s view shifted as he was rolled onto his back and he heard a thud and felt a fist hammer down on the center of his chest, heard a rib crack but didn’t feel anything because the pain inside him was already too great.

Josef looked beyond the silhouette of the man and up to the sky where thin white clouds slid across its deepening blue. He had worked in this room for over forty years but this was the first time he could remember looking up. He had never looked at the sky in the camp either, had always found it too painful to gaze up at such simple, boundless beauty when all around him was ugliness and horror.

The man continued to pound on his chest but Josef knew it was pointless. There was no saving him now. The man in the white suit was not coming. He would not cheat death a second time. He took a last, deep, jagged breath. Stared up at the indigo sky. And closed his eyes.

He stopped pounding on the brittle chest and looked down at the tailor’s broken body. He could see the outline of ribs beneath the dark blood and papery skin and watched for a while to see if they moved. They didn’t.

He took another tissue from his pocket, balled it up, and wiped it around the slashed, wet edges of the star then stood and moved through the silent, headless crowd of mannequins to a blank section of wall on the far side of the atelier. He pressed the bloody tissue to the wall, dabbing it on the chalky surface and returning to the body whenever the tissue ran dry. It was full dark by the time he had finished but he could see what he’d written on the wall. Death was not enough for Die Anderen, they also had to know it was coming and feel its shadow on their backs, exactly as it had been in the camps.

He began to search the atelier. No one was due back here until morning, so he took his time, working steadily and searching the main house too, looking for the list and the suit Josef Engel had mentioned. He found nothing.

When he had finished, he stood in the center of the atelier and looked down at the still figure on the floor, listening to the scratching and squeaking rats and the clock striking midnight in the hallway. He wondered if Josef had wound the clock that morning, not realizing it would keep ticking after his heart had stopped. Time had run out for the old man, like it did for everyone in the end—like it would for him soon enough.

He felt tired and empty and the pain in his head was starting to grow but he wasn’t finished here, not quite. He moved over to the wooden box, lifted the hatch on the side, and dark shapes poured out, scraps of darkness scrabbling across the polished floorboards toward the scent of blood. They swarmed over the body, fighting and squeaking as they tugged at the cooling flesh and each other as they went into a feeding frenzy.

The man watched them for a long time. Listening to the tick of the clock and thinking about the list and what he had missed, and everything he had to do before all of this would be over.

2

Madjid Lellouche snicked away another withered vine before looking up. He knew he would be in trouble if he was seen to stop work, even for a moment, yet something made him pause and turn—and then he saw him.

The man was maybe fifty feet away, passing in and out of view between the plane trees lining the Roman road built at the same time as the vineyards. The road was directly behind where Madjid was working and lower down the hill, so no movement could have caught his eye. He was also far enough away that the sound of footsteps could not have reached him, even if the wind had been in the right direction, which it wasn’t. There was no wind today anyway, only sunlight and the melting ground mist and the promise of another day of solid heat that would sit like a boulder on his back as he worked, drying the ground to dust between the green lines of vines.

Madjid shielded his eyes against the glare of the morning sun and watched the man pass in and out of view between the trees, moving through the mist that pooled in the lower valley. He was pale and slender and tall and wore a light suit jacket that looked formal and old, and his hair was white though he seemed young, moving with the smooth grace of a dancer and not the stiffness of a man of advanced years. Madjid listened through the whine of insects for the sound of his footsteps and heard instead the snap of a twig behind him, and the swish of a cane cutting through the air followed by the sharp burn of sudden pain.

The fuck I’m paying you for?

Madjid turned and raised his arms against the next blow. "Désolé, he called out, backing away from the man with the stick in his hand. Désolé, monsieur." Madjid bumped against the vines and a handful of grapes pattered onto the dust, their skins wrinkled and spotted with blight.

Sorry doesn’t get the work done. The cane sliced back down and Madjid felt the bite of it on his forearm and fell to his knees. He stared up at the large, sweaty figure of Michel LePoux through a gap in his raised arms and saw anger burning in piggy eyes staring out from a bright red face. "Désolé, Monsieur LePoux," he said.

The cane rose again and Madjid closed his eyes against the blow. Heard the swish of it coming back down and the slap of it striking skin, only this time he felt no pain. He opened his eyes and looked up. LePoux was standing right in front of him, silhouetted against the bleached blue sky—and so was the man from the road.

Ouch, he said, in a voice that was low like thunder and soft as the wind through the vines. "Ça fait mal—That hurt. He stretched the word mal, like the locals did, and it came out sounding more like mel."

LePoux tugged at his cane, trying to free it from the man’s grip but he held on to it with little apparent effort, despite the fact that LePoux was twice the weight of the stranger. LePoux stopped tugging and glared at the man. You’re trespassing.

And you are violently assaulting someone, the stranger replied. Which of those crimes is the greater, do you suppose?

Crime? LePoux spat on the ground. "There is no crime. This man is mine and what I do with my property on my land is my business."

He yanked the stick again and the stranger let go, sending LePoux stumbling backward. He grabbed at the vines and more shriveled grapes pattered to the ground. The stranger dipped down to pick one up. Your country banned slavery in 1831. He crushed the grape, sniffed the pink juice, then licked the end of his finger and looked up at LePoux. So how can this man be your property?

LePoux stood up and pulled his sweat-damp shirt away from his skin. I don’t know who you are, monsieur. Your accent’s local but I know that you’re not. I know everyone around here—law, lawyers, judges, everyone—but I don’t know you and you’re trespassing on my land, so if I want to chase you off it with a stick or a shotgun, no one here would say a thing against it.

He raised his cane again but the stranger didn’t move. How long has this land been yours? he asked.

My family’s been here for five generations, LePoux replied, puffing out his chest.

The stranger stared at LePoux and shook his head slowly. Pity you won’t make it to a sixth.

LePoux’s face flushed red and his knuckles whitened. He lashed out with the cane, starting to bring it down hard on the stranger. LePoux was fast but the stranger was faster. He stepped aside as quick as blinking and the cane smacked onto the ground where he had been standing. LePoux stumbled forward, unbalanced by the force of the blow, and the stranger stamped down on the middle of his stick, breaking it in two with a sound like snapping bone, then twisted and kicked LePoux so hard he flew right through the vines and landed in the next row in a tangle of wire and foliage.

He smoothed his suit jacket down and held out his hand to Madjid, who felt the strength in it as he pulled him to his feet. His hand was solid like marble and strong like a blacksmith’s, though with none of the coarseness of work upon it, and he seemed both old and young, his white hair ageing him but his smooth skin making him seem youthful. He could have been any age between twenty and sixty, though his eyes were old and black and deep, like staring into a well.

The next town, the man asked in his low voice, what’s it called?

Cordes, Madjid replied. Cordes-sur-Ciel.

He nodded. And is there a tailor there?

Monsieur Engel.

"What about a man or a place called Magellan?"

Madjid frowned and searched his memory. He wanted to help this man who’d helped him but the name meant nothing. I’m sorry, he said. I’ve never heard that name. He felt bad, like he had let him down in some way.

The stranger nodded and frowned. Thank you for your time, he said, then he turned back to LePoux. Your land is rotten, he said, plucking a leaf from a branch and holding it up so the sun lit up the orange-and-black tiger stripes on the green leaf. You have esca in all your vines but, given the sorry state of your land and the way you treat your workers, I would imagine you have neither the funds nor the reputation to get the help you need to cut it out. Your harvest will fail and you will be forced to sell, sooner rather than later. He dropped the leaf and turned back to Madjid. You should leave, he said. There’s nothing for you here but pain. Then he tipped his head in a courtly way and walked away.

Madjid watched him leave, moving through the vines and back toward the road. Behind him he heard crashing and huffing as LePoux scrambled back to his feet.

Get back to work, he said, picking up the broken halves of his cane and looking at them before throwing them to the ground.

Madjid looked around at the vines, the tiger-striped leaves glowing orange on almost every plant. The stranger was right, the crop was already lost. And when rot had claimed the whole harvest, LePoux would blame him, call him lazy and beat him as he drove him from the land without pay. He needed to get away from here. It was so obvious he felt as if he had woken from a spell. He had been blinded by his lack of options and by his blind faith in hard work. He looked back at the stranger who had opened his eyes. He was almost at the road now. What’s your name, monsieur? he called after him.

Solomon, the man replied without looking around, his voice as soft as before but carrying back to Madjid as clearly as if he had shouted it. My name is Solomon Creed.

3

Commandant Benoît Amand of the Police Nationale felt the buzz of an incoming call in his pocket. He ignored it, reaching out instead to wipe a finger across the swastika someone had sprayed on the Jewish memorial, the thick black paint dripping onto the names carved into granite remembering those who’d been rounded up and transported to the death camps on the night of August 26, 1942. He heard the crunch of footsteps across the boules court and the slop of water in a bucket.

You want to take pictures first? a voice asked.

No, Amand said, moving past him and heading across La Place 26th Aout toward Café Belloq on the far side of the square. I want you to scrub away all trace of it.

The breakfast crowd was sitting in the shade of a wide, red awning, drinking their coffee and staring at their phones and newspapers. A few were looking over at him. Jean-Luc Belloq was one of them. He had been polishing the same glass with his apron ever since Amand had arrived.

Amand reached into his pocket, his hand pushing past his now silent phone to the bottle of glycerine pills and unscrewed the lid one-handed so Belloq wouldn’t see. He passed the half-constructed stage, part of the planned celebrations to mark seventy years since the end of the Second World War. The banners weren’t up yet, otherwise the vandal might have defaced them too. The rest of the square was deserted, the chess tables and boules courts not yet populated by the old men who used the square as an alfresco social club. He palmed a glycerine caplet, popped it into his mouth under cover of a cough, maneuvered it under his tongue, and immediately felt the tightness in his chest melt away. His phone buzzed again, rattling against the pill bottle, but he let it ring, focusing instead on his breathing like his doctor had taught him as he mounted the stone steps to the café and nodded a greeting to the few diners who weren’t tourists.

Commandant, Jean-Luc said, polishing the glass as if it would never be clean. I still can’t get used to the way you look. Let me get you a coffee. He made to turn then stopped and struck his forehead theatrically with his palm. Sorry. No stimulants, right? Must be so frustrating to lose all that weight and still have the heart of a sumo.

The phone in Amand’s pocket stopped buzzing and the pill under his tongue continued to dilate his veins. What time did you open this morning? he asked.

Around six, same as always.

Notice anything suspicious?

Suspicious how?

Like someone over by the memorial plaque spraying a swastika on it? Jean-Luc shook his head. Anyone else around? He continued to shake his head. What about the café, anyone in before you?

I’m always first in.

When did you notice the graffiti?

I didn’t. Jean-Luc nodded at a waitress cleaning a couple of tables at the rear of the terrace. She did. She told me. I called you.

"Does she have a name?"

Probably. We have a high turnover of staff here and I’m not good with names.

Amand nodded. Café Belloq was notorious for working its staff into the ground and paying them peanuts. Mind if I talk to her? He started to head over and Jean-Luc followed. Amand stopped and turned to him. Alone, if you don’t mind.

Belloq looked like he did mind but the phone started ringing inside the café, the trilling bells like an echo from the past. It was an old Bakelite model, so ancient it had become fashionable again, a result of stinginess rather than forward thinking or style.

Shouldn’t you get that? Amand said. Jean-Luc glanced at the waitress, then turned and marched away. Amand waited until he disappeared inside the café before walking over to the waitress.

Mademoiselle? he said, stopping at her table. I’m Benoît Amand from the Police Nationale. She looked up in alarm from the croissant crumbs she was sweeping onto a plate. Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble. What’s your name?

Her eyes flicked over to the café where Jean-Luc was visible through a window, talking on the phone and looking in their direction. Mariella, she murmured.

Mariella, Monsieur Belloq says it was you who spotted the graffiti on the plaque. She gave a tiny nod. What time was this?

When I was setting the tables out. Six thirty maybe.

And when did you tell Monsieur Belloq about it?

I told him as soon as I spotted it.

And was anyone else around at that time?

No.

Thank you, Mariella.

She nodded and scurried away, grateful for the release.

Amand headed into the café, glancing over at the man with the bucket scrubbing away at the memorial plaque, the swastika now concealed beneath thick suds that dripped gray down the stonework.

He’s here, Belloq said, holding the phone out to him the moment he stepped into the bar.

Is that clock right? Amand asked, nodding at the grandmother clock that had kept time in the Café Belloq since before the war.

Belloq nodded. I reset it each morning when I wind it. Why?

Because I’m interested to know why it took you three hours to call us after you first saw a Nazi symbol painted on a Jewish memorial outside your café.

Belloq shrugged. Didn’t think it was important.

Amand took the phone and caught the smell of tobacco soaked into the black plastic over decades. Amand.

Why aren’t you answering your phone?

Amand stiffened, picking up on the tension in the sergeant’s voice. What’s up, Henri?

It’s Josef Engel. His cleaner just called. She’s hysterical, said that there are rats everywhere. Parra is already on his way to Engel’s atelier. She said that he’s been murdered.

4

Solomon’s hand stung where he’d caught the cane, a burning sensation that was not entirely unpleasant. He flexed his fingers to feed the ache and let it sharpen his senses as he walked down the road. He could smell hints of the town ahead of him now, like something small and hard buried beneath the softer, blanketing smells of the countryside: stone and concrete; hot tile and cooking oil; sour sweat and hair grease and the underlying sewagey stink of almost a thousand years of human occupation.

His feet were road weary inside the scuffed rancher’s boots he’d borrowed from a dead man in Arizona. They had carried him along the interstates and back roads of New Mexico and Texas, clanged on the sheet-metal deck of a container ship out of Galveston, and now trod the same straight road sandaled centurions had built two thousand years earlier. Squares of gray overlapped on the road’s surface where intense summer heat and dry frozen winters had split and cracked it again and again until it had become a thing of fragments—like Solomon himself.

The town of Cordes came into view gradually, emerging from the mist like a mountain castle at the end of the patchwork road. Castellated walls circled the summit, the thick stone worn with age and blending into the jagged outcrops of limestone from the original Puech de Mortagne. Stone buildings clung to the side of it like barnacles on a shark’s fin and Solomon could read the history of the town’s development in its architecture, oldest buildings at the top, youngest at the base, with narrow winding streets and long flights of stone steps linking the different levels. A thin tower rose up at the top, the name of the church it belonged to whispering in his head, prompted by the sight of it: L’Eglise Saint-Michel, the Church of St. Michael.

Solomon had seen the town before, in a dream. He slept little and dreamed hardly at all and when he did it was usually the same dream, the one of the mirror that showed no reflection. But once, in his cramped bunk in the galley of the transport ship, he had slipped into slumber and seen this place, misty and indistinct, exactly as it appeared now.

Cordes-sur-Ciel—Cordes on Sky—named for the phenomenon Solomon was now witnessing where the town seemed to float on the valley mist.

The town continued to materialize from the mist as he drew closer, and more facts surfaced in his mind:

Founded 1222 by the Comte de Toulouse . . . Almost ended by plague in 1348 . . . Battered by the Hundred Years’ War in the fourteenth century and the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth.

Market town. Merchant center. Textiles and wool, then indigo and broderie anglaise lace. The small crocodiles on a famous French designer brand had been made here.

Tourist town now, teeming in the long summer months with people drawn by its history and weather and the beautiful stone houses with views over vine-covered valleys.

The information cascaded through Solomon’s head, every fact correct but nothing that told him how he might be connected to the place. That part of his memory was gone, along with every other detail of who he was or might once have been. Whenever he focused his know-it-all mind on thoughts of himself, it fell silent—no facts, no memories. It was like staring into the mirror in his dream, the one that reflected nothing. All he had were fragments and questions.

He unbuttoned his tailored suit jacket and looked at the label stitched inside:

Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed—This suit was made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed.

The gold thread shone in the morning sunlight, spelling out around the edge of the label the address where the suit had been made:

13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.

He let the flap of the jacket fall back down, the cut fitting the slender contours of his body perfectly. This was the place where someone had measured him and adjusted the cut until it fit him like a second skin. Here someone must have taken payment, perhaps made arrangements for its delivery, noting down an address and a name, tiny fragments of his lost history that might lead all the way back to who he really was, like stones through a dark forest. He was incomplete and so was the story of the clothes he wore.

Ce costume, the label said—this suit—yet he had only the jacket.

He rebuttoned it, the scents of his long journey trapped in the fabric—the salt of the ocean, diesel fumes and rice-wine vinegar, horseradish and tobacco smoke. He flexed his hand and continued walking toward the town and the tailor he had traveled over five thousand miles to find. Toward the address stitched in gold on a label. Toward answers.

The scent of the town was stronger now that he could see it, the smell of the people who lived here soaked into the stone over countless centuries and carrying on the misty breeze like pollen. Solomon breathed deeply, identifying each scent as easily as a florist enumerating the fragrance of different flowers. He knew the cause of each too, the emotion beneath each enzyme: fear, regret, happiness, longing . . . and a new scent, an unusual odor, sharp and metallic, that seemed more familiar to him than all the other smells blowing his way on the shifting breeze. It was a smell that made his heart thrum faster and the brand on his shoulder ache in a way that told him it was significant—the smell of freshly spilled human blood.

5

Lieutenant Emile Parra was already at the atelier on the Rue Obscure when Amand arrived. He parked his fifteen-year-old Citroën, stepped out into the street, and looked up at the silent and shuttered house, the single-story workshop built on the side with a sign above the door saying atelier engel—costumier.

Amand looked over at Parra. Who’s been inside the house?

Only the cleaner—and me.

Where is she now?

Parra nodded up the street to where a thin, gray woman in a pale blue housemaid’s smock sat on the steps of a shuttered-up holiday home, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the cobbles in a way that made her look like she was praying. Amand recognized Madame Segolin, a matriarch from one of the older local families. Have you questioned her?

Briefly. Parra flipped open a notebook. Says she got here shortly after eight because there was a line in Moulin where she gets Monsieur Engel’s baguette. She let herself in, smelled what she thought was blocked drains, went into the atelier, and saw Monsieur Engel lying on the floor. Then she saw the rats and ran outside. She called us on her cell phone and was sitting there when I got here. She hasn’t moved since.

Amand watched her rocking back and forth slightly, her eyes open but her focus vague. He imagined she was picturing whatever she had discovered lying on the atelier floor and his chest tightened a little at the realization that he was about to see it too.

Make sure she’s okay, he said. See if there’s anyone around who can give her a coffee or something stronger. He stepped past Parra and entered the atelier.

The foul smell hit him the moment he was inside; sewage and ammonia and rust triggering some primal part of his brain, making him want to turn right around and run. His father had told him once that being brave was not about being fearless, it was about being full of fear but doing the thing that frightened you anyway. Papa had spent five years in the French Foreign Legion fighting in North Africa and been invalided out after getting shot in the leg, so he knew what he was talking about. Amand reached into his pocket, popped another glycerine capsule under his tongue, and continued walking forward.

A plastic mop bucket lay on its side with bottles of bleach and cloths spilling out across the floorboards. He imagined Madame Segolin dropping it when she’d seen what was in the room. He moved toward it and looked ahead, but crowds of headless mannequins in various states of undress blocked his view. The rising heat of the day was already starting to stir the first pungent smells of decay into the odor of blood and piss and shit. He reached the bucket and the slumped figure came into view. It was lying in a dark puddle that reflected the light streaming down from the overhead skylights. Amand took